Ferrari’s Lewis Hamilton led the way in practice at the British Grand Prix before sprint qualifying later on Friday.<\/p>\n
The seven-time champion was 0.213 seconds quicker than championship leader Kimi Antonelli, with the second Ferrari of Charles Leclerc also heading the Italian’s Mercedes team-mate George Russell, winner in Austria last weekend.<\/p>\n
McLaren’s Oscar Piastri was fifth fastest, but 0.887secs off the pace, despite a spin at Becketts midway through the session.<\/p>\n
Red Bull’s Max Verstappen was sixth fastest, 0.980secs behind Hamilton and clearly struggling for grip, ahead of the second McLaren of Lando Norris and Red Bull’s Isack Hadjar.<\/p>\n
Audi’s Nico Hulkenberg and Racing Bulls’ Liam Lawson completed the top 10.<\/p>\n
The session took place under big blue skies in temperatures of 23C at the start of a weekend in which 500,000 people – an all-time record – are expected to be at Silverstone.<\/p>\n
Hamilton, the all-time record holder for wins at this track with nine victories, was a surprise pace-setter.<\/p>\n
He had predicted on Thursday that Ferrari would lose perhaps twice as much time on the straights to Mercedes as they did in Austria last weekend, where the 41-year-old struggled to fifth place two weeks after his landmark maiden Ferrari victory in Barcelona.<\/p>\n
Aside from Piastri’s spin, the session was relatively uneventful. Sprint qualifying starts at 16:30 BST.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Ferrari’s Lewis Hamilton led the way in practice at the British Grand Prix before sprint qualifying later on…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":531177,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[61,60,112],"class_list":["post-531176","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-sports","tag-ie","tag-ireland","tag-sports"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/531176","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=531176"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/531176\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/531177"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=531176"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=531176"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=531176"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}